Thursday, February 25, 2016

ProEXR AE update

Several years agoProEXR added the ability to render the layers of an After Effects comp into an EXR sequence, each layer given its own set of RGBA channels that could be pulled out independently in AE, Nuke, or another savvy program. This feature was accessed through the standard After Effects render interface, made possible by various loopholes in the After Effects API.

Well, all good things must come to an end and those loopholes were closed in After Effects CC 2015 as part of the program's re-architecture-ing. As a result this feature is now found where you might have expected it from the beginning, under Composition ➤ Save Frame As ➤ ProEXR. Unlike its neighboring Photoshop Layers feature, the ProEXR layer export will let you render out a sequence.

Users of previous AE versions can still use the render queue as they always have, and that's the only way to render on a farm. Or since AE CC 2014 can read CC 2015's project files, you could always open your project in the older version and regain the render queue functionality.